Collaborative computing environments, such as business-to-business (B2B) computing environments, typically use a messaging system to communicate messages between computing systems within the environment. When the collaborative computing environment is a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) or other type of distributed objects architecture, a business object may cause or initiate the generation of a particular message. An example of an SOA can be found in the Enterprise Service Infrastructure (ESI), which is commercially available from SAP AG, Walldorf, Germany.
The messaging system may be implemented by an exchange infrastructure, which is also commercially available from by SAP AG, Walldorf, Germany. The communicated messages can take virtually any form, such as the extensible markup language (XML) format, and can include a variety of content. The messaging system typically uses some form of routing scheme to route the messages from a sender to one or more intended recipients. As part of the routing scheme, the messaging system may process the message in various ways. For example, the routing scheme may change the message's content. The routing scheme may also need to split the routed message into different messages (e.g., “child” messages of the “parent” message).
As a result of this route processing, the generated message becomes decoupled from the business object. In other words, systems can not identify which business object was originally associated with a sent message. Conventional messaging systems and the computing environments in which they are used, have thus been unable to correlate business objects and corresponding messages during B2B messaging communications. This is due, in part, to the complexity of the messaging system and the routing schemes used by these systems. This is also due to the fact that the messaging system is a generic messaging system that does not have the capability to correlate business objects to messages.
It is thus desirable, when sending one or more messages to another computer system via a messaging system, to obtain and retain information about the sent messages and to correlate the messages with the business object(s) with which the messages are associated.